Which two major types of data mining models are identified?

• A. Clustering and Regression
• B. Association and Clustering
• C. Forecasting and Visualization
• D. Classification and Prediction

Answer: (D)

In data mining, the main distinction is between models that assign instances to categories and models that estimate numeric values. Classification tries to label each new instance with a discrete class, such as deciding if an email is spam or legitimate, or whether a customer will churn. Prediction, often referred to as regression in many texts, aims to forecast a continuous numeric outcome, like predicting house prices or yearly sales.

Both of these fall under predictive modeling because they use labeled training data to learn patterns that generalize to new data. They differ from descriptive approaches (like clustering or association) that describe patterns in the data without predicting a specific category or numeric value for new instances.

So, the two major model types are classification and prediction.